T-Error

Mid december 2007 Google announced its Wikipedia competitor “Knol” (what a name…). My guess is that it will be a huge “success” like Google Checkout (lesson: bad idea to come up with an alternative to a monopoly — especially years later — even when you’re Google) and that only people who also buy iphones will cheer (sorry for the sarcasm ).

But what is funny is that the domain Knol.com doesn’t even belong to Google. It’s owned by a dutch cleaning company that sells vacuum cleaners and steam cleaning equipment. They’re pretty happy about the additional free traffic they receive and even thank Google for that on their site:

Knol Stoomreinigingssystemen wil o.a. de volgende sites bedanken : Google
040 Hosting
nu.nl
Webwereld
TechCrunch
Blogoscoped

De aandacht is echt overweldigend !

Translation: “Knol steam cleaning systems wants to thank the following sites (among others ) […] the attention is really overwhelming!”

How can a company in the internet age decide on a product name without checking the associated domains first? All these people who type-in “www.knol.com” and only find vacuum cleaners? Tsk tsk tsk

Oh and respect for their sys admin - the site is still up despite the traffic.

Domains Google Knol Search engines Social Web Software Web 2.0

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While Google is hunting down SEOers, reducing page ranks etc. Google itself owns a SEO company! Through the acquisition of DoubleClick, Google also owns Performics. (well the deal  still needs approval)

Isn’t that a nice conflict of interest?

In the Webmaster Help center Google states:

“While Google doesn’t have relationships with any SEOs and doesn’t offer recommendations…”

Tsk tsk tsk…

More information:

http://www.searchengineguide.com/scott-buresh/a-slippery-slope-google-owns-a-search-en.php

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/what-will-google-do-with-performics/4720/

DoubleClick Google Performics Search engines SEO

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There’s (at least) one market where Yahoo! beats Google hands down: the very promising local search!

Here’s what Jupiter Research recently released.

“Yahoo! currently has more market share than the next five services combined, including both Google’s and MSN’s local services.” said David Schatsky, President of JupiterKagan.

advertising eBusiness Google MSN Search engines Social Web Web 2.0 Yahoo Yahoo local

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Finally, yesterday Google added an option where you can set the location of your website.

Login to The Google Webmasters Tools and choose “Set geographic target”. It is always nice to help Google and to tell Google more about your site.

Geolocation is used in both overall ranking (Google shows more german search results to german searchers etc) and local ranking (option “pages from Germany”). TLDs like .DE, CO.UK etc do not cause any problems to Google. But with TLDs like .com, .net etc Google cannot clearly associate a geolocation. So go and help Google know more about your site(s) and get better ranking!

@ Google: Please provide an API (or some kind of ping service like you did for sitemaps) for that so that this could all be automated instead of entered manually in Webmaster Tools. And please, we want more local goodies! TY!

*** UPDATE ***

The official BlogPost is now here btw.

Google is always committed towards helping more sites and users get better and more relevant results.
Yeah….

advertising geolocation Google local search Local web Miscellaneous Pagerank Search engines SEM SEO

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After CEO Terry Semel, Exec VP-Global Sales Greg Coleman, COO Dan Rosenzweig, CTO Farzad Nazem and Chief Sales Officer Wenda Harris Millard, it’s now the turn of Cammie Dunaway, Yahoo’s Chief Marketing Officer & Head of Customer Experience Division to leave the company. Allen Olivio will temporarily take over the position. Cammie has been credited as one of the TOP 100 best marketing experts according to “Advertising Age”. It is not clear where she will be working next but Valleywag thinks it might be Nintendo.

That’s another top manager that leaves the company within 12 months.

A management shake-up is not necessarily always — although it’s truly a sign — a bad thing . Hey, it made Jerry come back and in some way initiated his 100-day plan. Under Jerry’s reorganization Yahoo! appears to be narrowing its focus. Some C-level managers might not agree with the new policies and leave. But what’s important is what comes out of this process.

advertising Cammie Dunaway Search engines Yahoo

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Yesterday, local ad specialist and local content publisher Marchex (NASDAQ: MCHX, MCHXP) and Yellowpages.com, a subsidiary of AT&T (NYSE: T) announced that they signed a multi-year agreement in which Marchex will provide its local Internet search marketing services to Yellowpages.com.

The agreement will allow YellowPages.com to utilize Marchex’s local ad services for the YPclicks! Search Engine Solutions packages sold across the United States. The ads will be created under the Marchex platform and allows advertisers to target and manage ads through placements with the major search engines and the Marchex local content network.

Under the terms of the new agreement, Yellowpages.com will continue to leverage Marchex’s services to fulfill the YPclicks! Search Engine Solutions search marketing packages sold by Yellowpages.com and AT&T across the United States.

Marchex Connect, Marchex’s highly scalable private-label search marketing platform, is used to create, target and manage Yellowpages.com’s advertiser campaigns and fulfill them through placements on major search engines and Marchex’s local content network.

Charles Stubbs, President and CEO of Yellowpages.com said:

“Yellowpages.com’s online advertising products deliver value to local advertisers across the nation. This new agreement with Marchex extends our ability to offer our customers best-in-class search marketing solutions.“

According to Bizreport local searches which use some form of online directory assistance are growing 40% faster than typical online searches. Local search accounts for about 80 million monthly searches but by 2009 local search is expected to account for 30 billion monthly searches.

advertising eBusiness local content local search Local web Marchex Search engines Yellowpages

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After taking over Zinku, Google now acquired another mobile-based company: Jaiku. Helsinki-based Jaiku is sort of a Twitter. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

Why buy Jaiku if you already have Zinku? And why not directly acquire Twitter?! Also, these apps are pretty simple, why not develop it by yourself Google?

Regarding Jaiku, they say:

Activity streams and mobile presence are important areas where we believe Google can add a lot of value for users. Jaiku’s technology and talented team are a great addition to Google’s current application and mobile teams.

Google says:

We plan to use the ideas and technology behind Jaiku to make compelling and useful products. Although we don’t have definite plans to announce at this time, […]

I do think that Google already has definite plans. Google is more and more investing in social networks and in mobile-based apps. Mobile social networking and mobile blogging are on the rise and Google plans its GooglePhone. The mobile web is juicy enough to be invaded by AdSense/AdWords. Good reasons to invest in mobile companies and to acquire know-how. Well, and compared to Twitter, Jaiku has some interesting features like group creation, RSS import and threaded conversation.
Google has the power to market and scale Jaiku and definitely scare Twitter.

Regarding Twitter, RedMonk analyst James Governor thinks that RIM and Yahoo! would be acquisition candidates.

advertising Google GooglePhone Jaiku mobile blogging mobile social networks RIM Search engines Social Web Twitter Web 2.0 Yahoo Zingku

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Ever since GoDaddy cooperated with Google by offering “Google Apps for your domain” there where rumours about Google acquiring Godaddy. And it’s been a while now that such rumours appear in articles and in blogs. Speculations could be read at Domainnamewire and eWeek (excellent article by the way) for instance. Now that Yahoo! Finance also throws some fuel on the fire, I’d like to summarize the speculated indicators for the “marriage”:

• The above mentioned cooperation
• Google recently became accredited registrar (according to them to “understand the domain system to improve Google Apps”)
• Bob Parsons is usually very outspoken about his plans. Remember when he had to withdraw the IPO in 2006? He refuses to comment on this one though. (When asked he only said “I have no comment on that, but I’d like to.”)
• Bob recently filed patent applications for search, VOIP, e-mail and domain technologies. This makes him very yummy for Google

Reasons for Google to take over GoDaddy:

• $$$
• More knowledge, know-how and information about Webmasters
• Incredible amount of information and know-how about domains
• Sell webspace AND domain
• GoDaddy patents
• Google would avoid that GoDaddy switches its huge parking pages pool over to Yahoo!
• GoDaddy’s applications would perfectly fit into Google’s applications offering
• Google could effectively clean its databases for instance when domains expire, are unused or have afterwards different content.
• POWER
• EVEN MORE DATA

One thing is for sure, Bob is a very appealing target for Google. An acquisition would make perfectly sense for Google and it would be very lucrative for Bob. But on the other hand, Bob “16 rules” Parsons, ex-Marine, dedicated 100% entrepreneur, selling his assets to Google? Selling his baby to a predator? I cannot imagine that he would accept loosing control over his business (which surely would happen).

Such a mega deal would be a real shake-up in the domain industry!

Bob Parsons domain parking Domains GoDaddy Google Hosting Search engines

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From the good folks over at DirectNavigation.com:

According to Nielsen/NetRatings, the number of searches performed by the top 10 search engines during July 2007 was 7.773.174.000:

Top 10 Search Providers by Searches, July 2007

Provider	Searches (000)
Google	4.143.752
Yahoo	1.559.745
MSN/Windows Live	1.057.064
AOL	407.988
Ask.com	143.513
My Web Search	69.145
BellSouth	40.374
Comcast	37.311
Dogpile	25.675
My Way	24.534
Other	264.073
All search	7.773.174

[Source: Nielsen/NetRatings, 2007]

The number of direct navigation search is estimated to be 15% of all search traffic.

So that would make a whopping 1+ billion type-ins!

advertising CTR Direct navigation domain parking Domains PPC Search engines type in type ins

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The beta phase from July is over and Google now announced the availability of AdSense for Mobile, a program that contextually targets ads to mobile website content. This makes absolutely sense! The ever growing mobile web has been ignored for too long.

AdSense for Mobile will be available in the following countries: US, England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Ireland, Russia, Netherlands, Australia, India, China and Japan.

I wasn’t part of the invited beta testers but I hope that it’ll be well adapted to the mobile world: no scripts, no big towers/images, not increasing significally page size,…

And it seems that it is!

It supports Text Ad formats only and it doesn’t use any scripts (which would have really surprised me). Instead it generates server-side code.

The following server-side languages are supported:

• PHP Version 4.3.0 or higher
• CGI/Perl Version 5.8 or higher
• JSP Version 1.2 or higher
• ASP Version 3.0 or higher

And what about ColdFusion ?!

The mobile sites itself must be written in WML, XHTML or CHTML. You can find all requirements here.

See official press release here
Official blog entry

Adsense Adsense for mobile advertising dotMobi eBusiness Google mobile web Search engines

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